Sunday, August 19, 2018

Encountering the Cannibal: Melbourne University Open Day Introduction to Anthropology

Whether
it is medicine or psychology or astronomy university subjects aim at
professionalizing what is an ordinary experience pursued with varying intensity
by people in their everyday life. Medicating the body and thinking about the
body in medical terms did not begin, nor does it end, with the study of
medicine at university: people think medically about their bodies and the
bodies of others all the time. Even with the rise of medicine as a profession
people are wont to leave ‘thinking medically’ to medical doctors. There are
always people who will tell you they know better than the doctor without them
having pursued any medical studies. Such people often claim that what they
know, they know from experience. Such experiential knowledge acquired in everyday
life should not be discounted. It is a problem however when people who claim it
as a source of knowledge think that those studying medicine at university stop
having experiential knowledge. University knowledge comes on top of, not
instead of experiential knowledge. In medicine, it gives you access to an
accumulated, extensive, formalised, institutionalised and rigorous way of
thinking and doing medicine that one can only access through hard work, at
university.

Anthropology
is no different. One of its primary objects is the way we reflect on our
experience of cultural difference. This is something people do all the time
from very early in life. For most of us, the earliest experience of cultural
difference is when we get to visit our friend’s house for the first time,
perhaps for a sleepover, and discover that they do a number of things
differently in their household. In many ways, our first pre-anthropological
anthropology is when we go home and report to our parents or siblings on the
experience: ‘You should see what they have for breakfast!’ or ‘I can’t believe
how they talk to their mum and dad!’. We engage in our first comparative
analysis without necessarily calling it so. From this early experience of
cultural difference we move to more elaborate experiences of travelling and
encountering cultural differences connected to studying away from home and
travel. We move from ‘you should see what the neighbours do’ to ‘you
should see what they do in Kerala (assuming you’re not from Kerala)’ or ‘It’s
seriously weird how they live on the Gold Coast in Queensland (assuming you’re
not from there).’ Our life involves then continuous reflections on such
encounters with difference and a continuous engagement in comparative cultural
thinking. Anthropology offers on top of this everyday reflection, a formalised,
institutionalised and rigorous way of investigating and thinking about how we
do this kind of reflection.

Even
for those who do not wish to become professionals, anthropology involves a
reflection on the pitfalls of such everyday comparative thinking such as
ethnocentrism and the hierarchical classification of cultures. It is one thing
to note that unlike you who spreads a small quantity of it on your toast, the
neighbours like their breakfast vegemite piled on theirs, it is another to
think that your mode of eating it is normal and while theirs isn’t. This is an
early sign of ethnocentrism. You note that your friend’s dad doesn’t have a
dryer and hangs the clothe on the line and you think that your household is
more ‘advanced’ and that
they are ‘backward’ because you use the latest dryer. Note
your friend might come to your house and note that you use a dryer and decide
that you and your parents are ‘backward’ because you still seem unconscious of
the imperatives of global warming. Anthropologists are not immune from
ethnocentrism and ‘cultural hierarchy’-mode of thinking but anthropology over
the years has provided us with important tools to help us avoid such pitfalls,
or at the very least, when we feel we want to be ethnocentric, to do so fully
aware of the pitfalls of how we are thinking.

This
is why cannibalism offers a good ground for highlighting the way
anthropologists think. For cannibalism often invites the strongest forms of
ethnocentrism. Even a person who is otherwise a committed cultural relativist,
who always thrives on ‘respecting other cultures’, will find it hard to say:
‘ah well, in your culture you eat people, in my culture we don’t, that fine by
me’. Cannibalism also invites a strong hierarchical mode of thinking. It often
conjures images of backwardness, barbarism and primitiveness. But Claude
Levi-Strauss has argued that there are certain cultural continuities between
cannibalism and other forms of eating in the world. For instance, he argued
that endo-cannibals (people who eat their own people, usually eating a bit of
an ancestor as a demonstration of love and to ingest his or her spirit) tend to
boil the human meat that they are eating, while exo-cannibals (those who eat
the meat of others, usually eating a bit of a worthy enemy warrior again to
ingest their warring spirit) tend to grill the meat. Levi-Strauss argues that
this is in continuity with our own habits of favouring stews for homely
endo-dining (eating among ourselves, such as in a family dinner) while
bar-b-ques are favoured for exo-dining (eating with others in a social event).
This is why as one anthropologist noted it is more often than not men who
do the bar-b-que while women, as symbols of homeliness, are associated with
making stews. Stews, Levi-Strauss also stresses, are more located in the realm
of culture in that one needs a cultural utensil like a pot in order to stew,
while grilling is the unmediated, or only relatively mediated, action of nature
on nature: meat on fire. This might not seem much but such type of thinking
helps bring cannibalism in from the wild, as it were, by showing that far from
being a sign of wilderness, it is a cultural form like any other cultural form
and shares with other cultural forms some important characteristics.

Another
important way of thinking cannibalism anthropologically is to reflect on it as
a mode of ‘eating our own’ with an emphasis on what ‘our own’ means. Our
society highlights a human/non-human divide when we think what is edible.
Societies that engage in cannibalism also have a divide between what is and
isn’t edible except it is not as anthropocentric as ours. They see the divide
as between some humans, animals and plants and other humans and animals and
plants. They consider some plants and animals and even the landscape as ‘one of
them’ more so than other humans. For them eating such plants and animals is
considered taboo and is just as sacrilegious as cannibalism appears to us. We
can see a continuity today between such cannibalistic forms of thinking human
commonality with animals, and current vegetarian and, even more so, vegan,
modes of thinking which redefine the boundaries of what is the edible ‘non-us’
and the non-edible us.

I am
sure some tabloid newspapers, those great experts in university education, will
tell you otherwise, but anthropology does not invite us to become
‘pro-cannibal’. It will allow us, however, to be open to what we can learn from
cannibalism in terms of other ways of thinking our relation to nature in these
times where such alternative modes of thinking are so necessary in the face of
global warming.